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Citation needed. AFAIK real FP16/FP32 HDR lighting was unattainable on consoles until the 360/PS3 era which possessed GPUs that had the DX 9.0c feature sets which made them capable of doing so. Even then, it's still computationally expensive.

I can't find a video or photo of cursed mountain using, but I remember I could see it on the water when the buildings cast a shadow. I could tell because of the way the light looked(it wasn't fluorescent looking like bloom) and it was curved/rounded kind of. It also bent around the corner a little. Its listed in the HDR wikipedia. Type in Athena. That was the name of the game engine

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320:16:8 -> 352 GFlops. But half the die is magical mystery hardware, who knows what secrets it may hold? That's what the "fixed functions" talk is about. The alternative would be some asymmetrical core configuration, which is possible (but not necessarily likely) and would mean more GFlops.

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FP10 HDR lighting was actually used extensively by Valve in most of their Source based engine games, starting from their Lost Coast benchmark up until Half Life 2: Episode 2 (which featured an updated Source engine). It's not just the 360 that features this gimped HDR solution.

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FP10 HDR lighting was actually used extensively by Valve in most of their Source based engine games, starting from their Lost Coast benchmark up until Half Life 2: Episode 2 (which featured an updated Source engine). It's not just the 360 that features this gimped HDR solution.

This is the biggest blow to them for me. Especially then using non final specs for Durango or Orbis as a comparison (even if it would make it look worse) is just signs of click baiting and rushing out an article for it.

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Junior Member

Microsoft releasing Nintendo's own numbers had no effect at all. People already knew that the Xbox was the most powerful console and that the PS2 was the weakest. It was generally accepted that the GCN in the middle power-wise, which had no effect on sales because the PS2 still outsold the competition by huge amounts despite being a weaker machine than the Xbox.

Banned

This is odd. Only half the number of register files you'd expect from a 40 ALU cluster, but the register files are quite a bit larger. Which would make sense if the chip was 55nm, but Chipworks says it's 40nm, and the eDRAM appears to be too small for 55nm as well.

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This is odd. Only half the number of register files you'd expect from a 40 ALU cluster, but the register files are quite a bit larger. Which would make sense if the chip was 55nm, but Chipworks says it's 40nm, and the eDRAM appears to be too small for 55nm as well.

Banned

here's the thing though, we stopped using fixed functions a long time ago, the chances that they handle any particularly advanced effects which would translate into measurable performance boosts are slim to none.

Fixed functions are nothing more than specialized parts of the chip doing some operations. For example, GC/Wii had fixed function self shadowing (and to emulate them, maybe the WiiU has that fixed function too). ¿Is self-shadowing something not used today?
The fact that fixed functions are not used on PC nowadays doesn't mean that Nintendo couldn't include some of them to perform some common operations.

Of course I'm not saying they are there for sure, but it's a possibility...

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So I just finished getting up to speed on all the new information, at least the parts of it I can understand. Major thanks to chipworks! Honestly not sure why you guys decided to be so generous
I guess you believed it would be worth it to open up the discussion and get more people analyzing this custom part. Still, really appreciate this level of openness with the community!
The more disturbing part, from what I understand, is we still don't know what constitutes more than half of the silicon(!)
And that's not even getting into other apparent discrepancies like the amount/density of register files, as pointed out above..

Question to those more knowledgeable than I:
Is the logic for the custom Broadcom hardware on this die as well?
If not, is it possible there is any specialized circuitry here that is being used for image compression or maybe even sharing of information between the rendering pipeline and video compression hardware to help reduce bandwidth or latency of the signal?
We know this part of the design was given special consideration by the teams involved.

Additionally, do we know anything new regarding the ARM cores? Such as their size or location on the die?
Anything on the audio hardware for that matter?

I know little in the area of of IC design, but it just seems surprising to me that the majority of the silicon is taken up by things we can't account for yet...

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Assuming the GPU is capable of 350+ GFLOPS as explained on the first page, and comparing that to Xbox360 performance and something like Monolith's demo, is it reasonable to say that in terms of graphics, the Wii U GPU is being put to fairly good use in the 'X' demo?
If that's the case, perhaps all that extra silicon on the die is being put to a different use, such as more general purpose computing?
Maybe certain logic we'd normally expect to find in the CPU has been moved over here? (I mean computational logic, not things like cache which is being discussed separately). Would perhaps explain Iwata's GPGPU remarks as well as possibly go along with the emphasis on avoiding memory bottlenecks that could be achieved by having certain computational elements closer to the GPU..
Is there some way something like that (ie. programmable rather than fixed function custom logic) could account for a significant area of the die?

Banned

They decided to leave it at 720p so the 60 fps could be completely locked and freed them resources for some extra effects. One game I didn't know to be 1080p on the Wii U was Skylanders, which is only 720p on PS360 (or at least that's what some gaffer posted yesterday in the new Skylanders thread) but I don't think it achieves 60 fps.

XBox's shader architecture was more capable, its just that the difference in capabilities wasn't as big as some people made out, as long as enough effort was put in. Of course Hollywood (Wii GPU) had quite a lot of advantages over NV2a (XBox GPU), just that pixel/vertex shader flexibility/usability wasn't one of them. Still the most important thing that held back Wii's GPU was that Wii's method was so different to a modern shader architecture that it couldn't run the same style of code, meaning engines needed to be totally re-written. Just look at the Far Cry port from XBox to Wii, it was a mess despite Wii being more powerful, it all came down to the different pixel pipelines.

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This is odd. Only half the number of register files you'd expect from a 40 ALU cluster, but the register files are quite a bit larger. Which would make sense if the chip was 55nm, but Chipworks says it's 40nm, and the eDRAM appears to be too small for 55nm as well.

I wouldn't read too much into it. Given they were rearranging the ALU clusters in the first place, and they've obviously put a lot of thought into memory hierarchies, they probably just decided to go with fewer, larger, SRAM blocks for the register files for some reason. The size comparison does seem a solid indication that we're looking at 40 ALUs per cluster, though.

I'm at work at the moment, but I have some more thoughts on the last couple of pages for later.

Banned

I do wonder if that Marcan guy is just trying to stir up people. Knowing what he does about the hardware, comparing it to the Wii situation sounds incredibly ignorant and just generally dumb. The Wii was ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE weaker than the 360/PS3. We're talking numbers around 20x weaker while the Wii U seems to only be in the single digits. Anywhere from 3x-5x weaker, not to mention it actually has modern hardware. I just don't understand how anyone can compare the situations, assuming they know anything about the hardware of all the consoles

Banned

It also makes sense given that SOME Wii U multiplats are better. Trine 2 shows major improvements over the other console versions in it's graphics, sporting a lot of effects that were missing in PS3 and 360 versions. Game logic is identical. We know it's not the CPU that's given them more overhead to work with, because we know that's weaker, and the game shows no difference in physics/game logic etc.

if the GPU isn't somewhat more powerful then Trine 2 doesn't make any sense. Frozenbyte themselves have said it was the GPU that let them get more out of their engine, and if it was all coding magic rather than having more to work with, I'd imagine they'd be crowing about their achievements.

352 GFLOPs doesn't just 'sound right' or 'look right' it also lines up with things like Trine 2.

Banned

I'm looking at this chip and I'm also looking at the prowess of the games as a reflection of this tech, and I think to myself, "that seams about right."

Now, for those who say "just you wait for the awesomeness to come" - I wonder where they get that from (from a tech POV). I agree the more Nintendo gets their hands on this, the better the games will be - but I'm not seeing a huge jumps anytime soon. A couple franchises will gradually become better looking with time, but so will PS420 games. Every step of the way, the games will always look significantly better on the crop of new systems coming in the fall.

For those who imply this chip is garbage, I at first want to agree - but then remember Nintendo is clearly not gunning for technological superiority, rather sales of HD Nintendo IP.

Banned

I'm pretty much convinced now that my gut feeling was correct and D is Starbucks. Starlet had 128kB SRAM as TCM, so Starbucks needs to have those as well. And that seems to be exactly the amount located in this block. It might seem a bit too large for an ARM926, but there should be other stuff like the crypto engine in there.

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In now way am I saying the other 30% of the chip can bring it close to the PS4 and 720's performance, the Wii U's not going anywhere near their levels. All I'm saying is that it's more than the raw number being thrown around. As of this point, we still can't determine is performance.

A couple franchises will gradually become better looking with time, but so will PS420 games. Every step of the way, the games will always look significantly better on the crop of new systems coming in the fall.

This isn't about finding some sort of secret sauce that will magically make the WiiU as capable as Sony and MS next systems, it's figuring out what makes the WiiU tick since Nintendo isn't giving any information.

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Between the 1GB gDDR3, 32MB eDRAM, 4MB eDRAM and 1MB SRAM... what about the beyond3D speculation that WiiU is memory/bandwidth starved and therefor has trouble with alpha textures, as seen in a couple of launch games and the "X" trailer? How likely is this still, or rather the result of developers still (needing to) getting the hang of it.

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I don't care about specs all that much. What matters are 1. The end user experience with the hardware and 2. The games. Both are bigger issues with the WiiU at the moment than some future tech the WiiU will have to compete with.

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No, going by that comparison there are 8 clusters. The important information to discern from the comparison was that the size difference means that most likely there are 40ALUs per cluster meaning 320ALUs.